Blogs by Thomas Kabir

Last week we attended a public involvement conference organised by INVOLVE. INVOLVE was originally set up by the Department of Health in 1996. It remains one of the oldest Public and Patient Involvement (PPI) organisations in the world. We had a stand promoting our own work championing expertise from experience in mental health research.

What do we really know about young people’s mental health? We know it’s a big issue. Around 1 in 10 young people have experienced a mental health difficulty. Around 75% of people with a mental health problem start developing it before the age of 181.

This year has seen the expansion of our mental health science theme of work. We have engaged with scientists developing new treatments and testing them in research studies. Are these treatments that patients want? What are the ethical considerations of developing the treatment?

There is a growing amount of evidence that some mental health problems may be due in part to the brain becoming ‘inflamed’. In August BBC Radio 4 broadcast a programme about this titled ‘The inflamed Mind’. You can listen to the programme by clicking here.

‘Paranoia’. It’s one of those words that retain their stigma despite all the good work of campaigns such as Time to Change. A reason for this might be the way that the word is used so much in everyday life. The term your paranoid can be used as a response to so many statements.

Genetic link to depression discovered? A consortium of researchers from Oxford and China has discovered two specific regions of DNA that have been linked to depression. These findings were published in Nature in July this year. The results are some of the strongest evidence yet that genetics do indeed have some part to play in depression. Our Public Involvement in Research Manager, Thomas Kabir shares his thoughts on this exciting research in our latest blog.

“Thomas – you need to look at a protein structure from lots of different points of view to understand how it works”. This was some of the most valuable advice I ever got when I was doing my PhD. I was studying how proteins stick to one another to form complexes at UCL in London.

To say that schizophrenia is a controversial diagnosis would be putting it mildly. Almost everything relating to schizophrenia has been contested, often ferociously. Putting that to one side, there is a lot of research into schizophrenia particularly to understand causation and treatments.